Languages Spoken at Home by Fairfax County Elementary Students

Introduction

In the Fairfax-Falls Church Area, the Census Bureau estimates
that 373,215 persons (or 34% of the area’s total population) speak a
language other than English at home (2007-2012 ACS PUMS). September
2012 Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) student registration data
show that nearly half (49%) of the 96,483 students enrolled in
elementary school spoke a language other than English at home. The
FCPS data also show that over 170 languages are spoken at home
by elementary students and their families. The series of maps on this
web page illustrate the geographic dispersion of the most frequently
spoken languages other than English among FCPS elementary school
students.

Click on
image to enlarge

The chart to the left ranks some of the languages by frequency spoken
among FCPS elementary school students for 2009 and 2012. Spanish was
the most frequently spoken language in both years. Arabic, Amharic and
Telugu increased in rank between 2009 and 2012; while Korean,
Farsi/Persian and Tagalog decreased in rank. However, the rankings of
languages spoken by FCPS elementary school students do not represent
the rank order of these languages among the area’s total population nor
do the rankings reflect overall trends in ethnicity.

Languages of the World, by Kenneth Katzner, was the primary
resource used to group languages into language families (e.g.:
Romance, Indo-Iranian, etc.).